'Frontline' looks back on 'Bush's War' in Iraq
TELEVISION REVIEW
The two-part PBS program combines past documentaries and new material to assess the five-year conflict.
It was five years ago last week that the Marines from Camp Pendleton surged across the Line of Departure into Iraq to begin the U.S. ground campaign to topple Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was soon gone, but the armed forces' stay had just begun.
Predictably, the fifth anniversary has provoked a flurry of news stories seeking to assess how the war began, how it's going and, from an American perspective, when it's going to end.
The "Frontline" contribution to the anniversary genre is the two-part "Bush's War," largely drawn from pre- vious "Frontline" documentaries with a sprinkling of new material. The effort has the strengths and shortcomings of the "Frontline" approach: smart interviewing and good summaries but a sometimes tediously Washington-centric viewpoint and lack of historic context.
The two-parter begins with a recitation of the now-familiar tale of White House intrigue involving President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the rest of the cast in the days and weeks after Sept. 11.
That many of the key players are no longer in government -- Colin L. Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer III, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, most prominently among them -- gives a certain staleness to this rerun parsing of who said what to whom in what closed-door meeting.
There is also a kind of error by omission.
"Frontline's" methodology seems to imply that the Iraq war is the first time that U.S. war planning has been influenced by political concerns, interagency wrangling, clashing egos and hunches masquerading as hard intelligence. Several shelves of books about previous wars suggest that those human elements are ever present in how the U.S. wages war.
"Bush's War" lionizes the CIA's work in Afghanistan and sides with former Secretary of State Powell in his various behind-the-scenes skirmishes, proof again that public figures who submit to interviews, or know how to effectively dole out information on background, usually get a better deal from journalists than those who do not.
There is no indication that former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld assisted the "Frontline" staff. That's too bad, because despite his brash personality, the issues raised by Rumsfeld about whether the U.S. Army had become too ponderous and logistics-heavy for high-speed modern warfare were legitimate ones.
